


sugar, how'd you get so fly?

by thessalonike (starblessed)



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: Chaos, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Hijinks & Shenanigans, no one has the braincell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starblessed/pseuds/thessalonike
Summary: The boys haven't really tried to push the boundaries of their ghost abilities, beyond teleporting and summoning their instruments. It's Willie's idea to try, really, but completely Alex's fault for going along with it."This blame game is super fun and all, but can someone please get me off the ceiling?"In other words: Alex figures out how to float. ("Figures out" is being generous.)
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters
Comments: 14
Kudos: 90





	sugar, how'd you get so fly?

Her mom used to call it the “Mama Spidey Sense.” A very loud, very accurate superpower that only parents have, to let them know when something is Going Down.

It’s how she always knew immediately when Julie came home with a bad math grade — how she had a sixth sense when Carlos was trying to hide something he broke, or Julie was busy with her sketchbook instead of doing homework. It’s how, when Carlos tumbled off their old tire swing, she _flew_ out of the house and across the front yard to catch him before he hit the ground.

Mom always knew when something was up; the Spidey Sense is a force to be reckoned with.

Somewhere down the line, the universe must have gotten mixed up, because Julie’s nowhere _close_ to a parent... but somehow, as she descends the steps on her way to the studio, she just _knows_.

Something is up.

It’s too calm. It’s too quiet. The guys _can_ be quiet, sometimes — in the middle of the night, or when they’re off being loud someplace else. They’re totally capable of it, but like most teenage boys, they just don’t choose to be. Usually, when all three are in the studio, Julie can hear them a mile away. If they’re not practicing, they’re shooting hoops outside, and if they’re not doing that, they’re shouting at each other and messing around. Even though Julie is the only person in the world who can see them, the boys make themselves hard to miss.

Now, everything is quiet - _way_ too quiet - and it sets Julie on edge immediately.

She approaches the door with caution, on the balls of her feet. The closer she gets, the more her instincts scream — _something’s broken, something’s wrong, someone’s set something on fire_ — and the more she’s compelled to just charge in there. No, though, that’s not the way to go. This operation requires finesse.

Reaching the doors, Julie cranes herself up on her tip-toes to peek through the window. What she sees almost makes her drop right back down.

“Almost there, just a little higher —“

“On your toes, Reg, on your toes!”

“Alex, can you grab on?”

“Really not an option at the moment!”

“ _Stretch,_ Reggie —“

Half a second later, Julie bursts through the doors.

_“Why is Alex on the ceiling?”_

All three resident ghosts freeze, like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Julie Bus. If Alex looks awkward — fifteen feet off the floor, perched in one of Julie’s mom’s suspended chairs — Luke and Reggie just look like idiots. They’re tag-teaming a broom, neither one with much of a grip on it; at first, it looks like they’re trying to clear cobwebs from the rafters, but two seconds of observation and it’s clear they’re actually trying to sweep _Alex._ The broom keeps tilting, nearly coming down on their heads, but the more they miss, the more determined they seem to be.

When Julie bursts into the room, the broom clatters to the ground.

“Uhh…” Luke blinks, then pastes on a too-bright grin, like this is the most normal thing they’ve done all day. “Hey, Julie! What’s going on?”

He does not get to ‘hey Julie’ his way out of this one. “Why,” she reiterates, “is Alex on the ceiling?”

“Great question,” says Alex, and offers a tiny wave.

“Come _down_ from there!”

“I’d really, really love to.” He shuffles around, spinning around on the seat without really moving. His arms grip the chair’s back, while both of his feet are twisted in the rungs below. It’s not how a normal person sits in a chair; everything about him, from his stiff, tense posture, to the fact that he’s not even on the ground, suggests he’s forgotten how chairs work.

Julie’s eyes narrow behind her glasses; she squints, peering up at him. Realization drops on her head like a stone.

Alex isn’t sitting in the chair.

He’s clinging to it for dear life.

“The thing is, I don’t actually know how? And, like — if I let go, I’m gonna hit my head on the rafters again, and when you think about it, these chairs are _really_ conveniently placed —“

His feet loosen their grip, for just a second, and the lower half of his body seems to lift into the air. For a second, he’s just _hovering there,_ like someone’s sucked the gravity out of the room and left him without a space suit… but before he can drift any further, he yelps, scrambling for a tighter grip on the chair. Somehow, he pulls himself back. His legs twine around the chair legs, safely tethering him to something again, even if it’s not the floor.

Julie’s incredulous gaze slowly swivels from Alex to the boys on the ground. You know, where they’re _supposed to be._

“Uhh… yeah.” Luke clears his throat, hand drifting to the back of his neck. “We’ve got a problem.”

* * *

No one told Alex to go out and learn how to float. It’s not an idea anyone put in his head; he came up with it all on his own, which makes it worse. He’s supposed to be the sensible one, the one with impulse control. The one who doesn't set out to do dumb, dangerous ghost things for the heck of it.

“Willie thought it would be cool,” is his only excuse.

Levitation isn’t something every ghost can do — only the powerful ones, according to Willie — but apparently, he saw potential in Alex. They spent the whole afternoon at the pier together, leaping off tall things, reaching towards the sky... just trying to get their feet off the ground by any means possible. Little kids do the exact same thing on the playground, while pretending to be Superman… only, in this case, the chance that they might end up airborne was a real possibility.

In theory, at least. In practice, both Alex and Willie just ended up with a lot of ghost bruises. They spent a solid few hours on that, and were _about_ to throw in the towel for the day, really, when...

“Come on,” prompts Reggie. “Tell her how it happened.”

Alex lifts his head and mumbles something to the rafters.

“What was that?”

“He said he _believed in me_ , okay?” Slowly, Alex’s gaze drifts back down, the way his body can’t. “And, uhh, then he — then he winked at me.”

Reggie mimes a dramatic _whoosh_ , all the way up to the ceiling. Julie bites back a grin. In retrospect, _Willie_ is the only excuse Alex really needs.

By the time Alex poofed back to the studio, he was walking on air. Two seconds later, he really was. 

“He just took off,” Reggie exclaims, miming the act with so much enthusiasm that he nearly smacks Luke in the face. “Like someone turned off the gravity! Isn’t it cool?”

“No, Reggie!” Alex exclaims. “Not cool!”

“He smacked his head on the ceiling,” Luke affirms with a wince.

“Did you know there are spiderwebs up here?” Alex’s voice echoes from his precarious perch; when he looks around, momentum lifts him halfway off the chair. “I think I found an old bird’s nest!”

Try as she does to keep up, Julie’s still stuck on the _floating on the ceiling_ thing. “You really can’t get down?”

“That's all I'm trying to do. I can’t get _anywhere_. I have no control!”

“Why don’t you just…” She makes a few vague hand gestures. “Poof down?”

Reggie clicks his tongue. “See, that was our first idea.”

“Apparently, it’s a ‘one thing or the other’ deal,” Luke says, inserting himself neatly between Reggie and Julie. “If you’re floating, you can’t pop out, and since he can’t come down...” His lower lip juts in a pout— and he really shouldn’t be allowed to look sympathetic, because he’s clearly enjoying this more than Christmas and Halloween put together. Julie elbows him; Luke’s eyes sparkle as he dances a step back. “I dunno! I guess it's like hopping on one foot and patting your head at the same time. Just can’t do it.”

Julie and Reggie exchange glances, and immediately start hopping on one foot while patting their heads. Luke gapes at them.

“Guys?” Alex’s voice rings down from the ceiling. “Guys! Can we please focus here?”

“Focusing implies that we have a plan,” Reggie replies, loud enough for Alex to hear. He's still hopping. “Which we don’t! The closest we got was, reach something up there, try to tow him back in —“

“If he caught the broom, he could at least take care of the spiderwebs while he’s up there.”

“No more brooms! Luke kept sweeping my butt!”

“See, I've got my priorities straight,” says Luke. Julie can’t _help_ cackling at that one. As soon as she starts, Luke starts, and that sets Reggie off; within seconds, they’re absolutely no help to anyone.

“It’s not funny!” exclaims Alex — and finally, all annoyance is gone from his voice, replaced by a note of hysteria. “ _How_ can you be laughing at this? What if I phase through the ceiling on accident? If I end up outside I could _literally_ float away and never come back down again!”

"Like — like an Alex-shaped balloon!" Reggie clutches his stomach, cackling even harder. Luke clutches his shoulder, muffling giggles into the back of his own hand. Julie snorts — and then her laughter cuts off entirely.

“A balloon,” she says out loud. “ _There’s_ an idea.”

* * *

In Julie’s defense, she never called it an _easy_ idea. She never said it was a safe idea… a smart one... or even a good one. Most ideas are just softball pitches anyways (and she’s used to Flynn shooting her worst ones down before they can fly into the spectator stands and injure someone). 

The boys, though, jumped on her pitch with so much enthusiasm that as quickly as she could float it, the ball started rolling.

Julie's brain is still on _I guess we’re doing this_ mode... even as she’s hanging over the edge of the loft railing, reaching as far as humanly possible without breaking her neck.

“A little further, Julie! You’ve almost got him!”

“Alex, man, can you stretch your leg or _something_ —“

“I’m stretching all I can!” exclaims Alex — who, to his credit, has extended his leg out at a flawless 180° angle. A trained ballerina wouldn’t be able to find fault in his form — and he's got the longest legs out of all of them — but they’re still not quite there yet. Untethered from the chair, having let go in an attempt to get closer, Alex now free-bobs like a cork in the air. It’s wild to watch him. He’s hovering, close enough to the ceiling that he bumps his head whenever he moves too quickly. His feet flail, and he can’t keep from fidgeting… but it’s not like swimming, not like he can push himself through the air around him. He’s really just bopping around up there.

Julie reaches a little further, clasping the makeshift leash tight in her hand. They found a whole roll of decorative twine in one of her mom’s old trunks; and, knowing from previous arts-and-crafts experience that it’s the strongest material in the universe, Julie instantly declared it perfect. All they have to do is get the string around Alex’s ankle. He can tighten it himself, make sure it's comfy, and then… be pulled back to earth.

“Or at least he won’t float away,” Julie explained. “Like putting a string on a balloon.”

“I really don’t love this metaphor,” Alex had contributed from the ceiling.

Even now — with everyone literally stretching their limits to help him — Alex _still_ has opinions. “Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea?” he demands, voice strained from the effort of stretching so far without floating further out of reach. “Everything could go so wrong so fast.”

That’s… not an exaggeration. Reggie’s got a firm grip around her waist, and Luke’s holding onto Reggie, so it’s not like they can _all_ fall at once… but disaster definitely isn’t ruled out. Again, she _never called it a good idea._ Julie’s the lightest of the group, though, and the most flexible. It was only logic that _she_ get up on the railing. It’s less likely to break under her… even if it does creak dangerously whenever she shifts her weight, and the ground looks an incredible distance away when she looks down. 

Simple solution: don’t move too much, and don’t look down.

 _(Do ghosts even weigh anything? On second thought, why is she the one risking her life, when_ she's _the only one with a life to risk?)_

She leans a bit further forward; the railing groans. Alex’s head bobs against the ceiling rafters as he shakes it with vigor. “This is the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done!”

“We set off pyrotechnics in the garage that one time just to see if they'd work,” says Luke.

“Remember when we went swimming in the ocean at night and saw that buoy that looked like a shark?” volunteers Reggie.

"We hitchiked on the Ventura freeway."

"Luke made friends with those mafia dudes down at the pier!"

"How about when you cut Bobby's hair?"

“We ate street dogs out of the back of a car.” 

“That one _literally_ got us killed.”

“You guys!” squeaks their fourth bandmate, from her precarious perch on the loft railing. “Less talky, more holdy onto Julie, okay?”

So she kind of tempts fate with that one.

A few things happen at once, too quick to keep track of them all. Alex kicks his leg towards her, and his sneaker suddenly swings to meet her, nearly smacking her in the face. Julie doesn’t expect it; she startles with a yelp, and twists straight out of Reggie’s hold. Luke shouts and lunges forward, but misses her by a hair.

Just like that, Julie’s falling.

The boys’ cries echo around her; she can’t hear them past the rush in her ears. There’s only the drumbeat of her own heart, the world swooping by upside-down, and the ground, getting closer and closer by the microsecond —

**_“Julie!”_ **

And suddenly, strong arms have caught her around the waist, hauling her back up. Julie chokes against the grip, but doesn’t fight it; instead of a misshapen splat on the ground, she’s suddenly hovering above it. Head-over-heels, the world is blurry and uncertain. All she knows for sure is she isn’t broken, isn't falling anymore… and the grip around her is secure. When she slowly lifts her head, she finds herself clutched to Alex’s chest, his strong arms cradling her like a firefighter holds a kitten.

Julie blinks up at him. The horror slowly fades from Alex's wide eyes. He exhales in one long breath, ruffling her wild curls. “Are you okay?” he asks in a low voice, gaze gentle with concern.

Julie has to actually consider the question; it’s a minute before she can nod. “I think so, yeah.”

“Good,” Alex replies, with another relieved sigh.

“Alex,” Julie says, very casually.

“Yeah?”

“Are we floating?”

“Hmm?" He looks around, then down. "Oh. Yeah. Absolutely.”

Julie takes in their surroundings too. It's not really a surprise to find them both airborne in the middle of the studio. They’re not on the ceiling, and not on the ground; instead, they’ve landed somewhere in-between, an even middle that isn’t scary to look down from at all. Dropping from this height would be like jumping off the bed.

Reggie and Luke practically tumble over each other down the loft ladder; as soon as they’ve reached the ground, they rush over to them. “Julie!” Her name rings out in two different, identically-frantic tones. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, guys, I’m fine.” She leans over to give them a shaky thumb’s up. Without loosening his hold on her, Alex mimics the gesture with the hand not cradling Julie’s spine.

“Oh, thank god,” Reggie groans, pressing a hand to his head. “We didn’t _mean_ to let you go, you just slipped —“

“And then Alex,” adds Luke, “he was just—“

Reggie mimes an aggressive swoosh, like a poor man’s Superman.

“Did I really?” Even Alex sounds surprised by the news… but when Julie looks up at him, a tiny smile on her lips, the bafflement fades from his expression. “I mean… okay, guess I did. I didn't even realize it, I just... you were falling, and I had to catch you. That's the only thing I thought of... making sure you were okay.”

And slowly, slowly, as he comes to this realization, Alex and Julie drift towards the ground.

They don’t realize they’ve made it until Alex’s feet touch down. He startles, bouncing Julie in his grip; as soon as she’s certain they’re back on solid ground, she’s squirming out of his arms. He lets her go without complaint; Alex is too busy looking around, like he’s trying to figure out how he got back to earth.

As soon as she’s on solid ground, Luke wraps her in a fierce hug. Reggie’s quick on his heels to follow a second later, burying his face in her hair.

“New rule,” Luke says. “No more Julie in life-threatening situations.”

“I agree with that one,” chimes in Alex. “It doesn’t matter to us, cause we’re, y’know, dead.”

“Another thing!” exclaims Reggie, without pulling himself out of Julie’s hair. He settles for jabbing a finger blindly at Alex instead. “No more testing out cool ghost powers! We all fly, or none of us get to fly.”

“How about just ‘no more Alex flying’? Is that good? Can we make that rule?”

“If you think I’m getting up on that ceiling again anytime soon —“ As if to emphasize the point, Alex starts to sit down, right there on the hardwood floor. Julie doesn’t give him a chance. Reaching out, she seizes the front of his jacket and tugs him into the embrace. He’s immediately swallowed up by Luke and Reggie, drawn in by their eager arms and made the centerpiece. When Julie wraps her arms around his chest, she imagines she’s tethering him to earth… just like he snatched her from the sky.

_(“Is it bad that I really, really want to learn how to fly though?” Reggie asks later._

_Julie and Luke exchange thoughtful glances, diligently annoying Alex’s incredulous gaze from the other side of the couch._

_“Yeahhhh,_ _” says Luke, dragging out the word until they're all uncomfortable. "Let's just agree on 'never again' for that one, huh boys?")_

**Author's Note:**

> IF CALEB’S CRUSTY VAUDEVILLE ASS CAN DO IT THE BOYS HAVE EVERY RIGHT. GIVE THE PHANTOMS THEIR DEFYING GRAVITY MOMENT 2K21
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [reggieshairflip](https://reggieshairflip.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
